MEDIUM WELL : A Lost Passport Precipitates a Panicky Pursuit Until a Channel Eye Lands on It

Ellen and her roommate, Lori, live in a nice bungalow, a small one on the Westside, with fruit trees and plenty of sunlight and room for the cats to run around. Last month, Ellen’s parents were taking her to Australia for a few weeks, and she was supposed to meet them at the airport that night for an 8:30 plane. The day of the flight, Ellen lost her passport.

“I got that weird feeling when I woke up,” Ellen said. “You know how you get those weird feelings? But I thought it was because I was stressing about how I was going to have to spend so much time with my parents. You know how parents are.

“I thought I’d put the passport with the tickets--that’s what you do, keep the passport with the tickets, right?--but I couldn’t find the passport anywhere, and I couldn’t believe it, and I got really calm. That’s what I do when I panic . . . . I get really calm.

“Basically, I had visions of having to tell my father that I didn’t have my passport--he’s already had one heart attack--and seeing him clutch his chest and drop dead right there in the airport, and it would have been all my fault.

“I decided to get packed and ready. That way, when my dad had a heart attack, at least I’d have packed bags.

“Rick always stops by in the middle of a crisis. He’s like Mr. Take Charge. Lori and I didn’t even think of calling to change flights or get a new passport. . . . He even called Australia.

“Lori remembered that on TV people are always calling clairvoyants to solve crimes, so she was looking for somebody that my massage therapist had recommended. She called a lot of other psychics, too, left a lot of messages, but we didn’t get many calls back. Each time, I could hear her mention that it was an emergency. A psychic emergency.

“I was in my room packing, and Lori had finally gotten a psychic, and she yelled, ‘What’s your sign?’ and Rick was on the phone to the consulate and yelled, ‘What airline are you taking?’ and I shouted back ‘Pisces! Qantas!’ and folded another blouse.

“The first psychic I talked to--Lori had already tried to hypnotize me by that point--said, ‘I see you are going on a long trip,’ and I said, ‘I know , I just told you that.’ She told me to clear my chakras and send my energy up into the sky, and she kept asking what colors I saw. I’m telling you, by that time the only color I was seeing was red. I could have killed her.

“By the end of the day, I was reduced to figuring out who would actually drive me to the airport and see my dad have the heart attack. Nobody volunteered.

“Finally, another psychic called, hours after she was supposed to--Lori was in the shower crying by then--and said: ‘I’m throwing cards now. I can see that you are going on a long trip.’

“ ‘Not you too,’ I said. ‘I told you that already.’ I was really trying to work with the psychic. I was really working it.

“ ‘But I can see your passport,’ the psychic said. ‘I see it in a place with dark wood. What’s your dresser like?’ and I asked if she knew that dresser from Plummers, that one with the fake teak?

“ ‘One of those five-drawer models?’ the psychic asked. ‘No, definitely not in there. Do you have a desk?’

“ ‘An old one, from the ‘20s.’

“ ‘Not in there. It’s in a very dark place. Go to the closet.’

“I started to whine a little, ‘cause I’d looked through every inch of that closet, but I cradled the phone against my shoulder, walked over there and reached up toward a corner of a top shelf.

“ ‘Not up there,’ the psychic said. ‘Not over there, either.’ She asked where I kept my shoes, and I told her about the shelf and she said, ‘Not there, lower.’ Then I remembered the basket on my closet floor, and she told me that the passport was in there, way at the bottom. I told her I’d looked in that basket, and she got all testy.

“And I had looked in that basket, but only near the top, I guess, because the passport was there and I jumped and screamed, and Lori ran out of the shower naked and jumped and screamed, and our neighbors started screaming, too, and the phone kept ringing--Lori had called her friends, and they kept calling back with the visions they’d had. All of them wrong, by the way.”